


Please Speak Well of Me

by theshipsfirstmate



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, As well, F/M, I just want them to be happy, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Finale, Post-Season/Series 08 Finale, Queen in the North, Slow Burn, probably?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2020-03-27 13:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19014052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: Post-finale. About a year later, Arya ventures to Castle Black with some news.“The lone wolf dies, Jon.” Ned Stark’s words have rung in his ears a few times in the last year, but they sound more dire coming from his daughter’s mouth. “You need your pack.”





	1. You Did What You Did, and That Was That

  _A/N: To be perfectly honest, I’m new to this fandom and still kinda coming to terms with this ship and my feelings about it. But I opened a doc and this just came flying out. Hoping it will be a few chapters, but I’m not really sure how far I’ll be able to take things. This is a good intro, right? Please don’t leave._

_Title & chapters from [“Please Speak Well of Me,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i5BUYCQRKQ) by The Weepies. _

**Part 1: You Did What You Did, and That Was That**

“Your sister’s at Castle Black.”

The words from Tormund hang in the icy air for a long moment, and as they make their way into Jon’s consciousness, he wonders if it’s the first thing he’s actually heard in over a year.

The winds blow so strongly up here, in the true North. He had nearly forgotten, the way the frosty howls could deafen you for hours at a time. He sometimes goes days without speaking, without hearing, without any sound around him other than the roar of a winter that would take more than a Valyrian steel dagger to kill. It’s a very different life than the one he thought he’d be living all those moons ago.

Not that he's been doing much living at all. He spends some of his time with the Free Folk, but their merriment starts to ring shrill and false in his ears after too long, and he’ll venture out on his own, riding a straight line in one direction until his horse can’t any longer, half-hoping the snowy gusts will sweep him away into nothingness.

“Cousin,” he corrects Tormund automatically. The bigger man just shrugs, and Jon realizes he's already saddling his horse for him, expecting him to venture south at the news.

He should, Jon knows it, but he can’t seem to make himself move from his spot by the dwindling fire. His heart is pounding in his chest, a two-beat to the sound of a name that fills every second of silence in his mind these days. He's afraid to ask, but he knows he must.

“Which one?”

“The scary one.” Jon bites back a smile despite the way disappointment flashes through him, sharp and shameful. For some, that wouldn't be enough of an answer, but he knows Tormund well enough to understand.

 _Arya_. The chorus in his head quiets for a moment at the thought of her, how he's longed to see her as well. He’s longed for all of them, all the characters in the book of his tragic history that he left on a shelf somewhere south of the Wall. Arya, Bran, Sam, Davos…

When he pauses, the other name returns to fill the silence once again.

“She's brought the Lord of Storm’s End with her, too.” Tormund interrupts his reverie, and when Jon glances up at him, his brow is furrowed. “Still jus’ looks like a smith to me, though.”

Something kindles in Jon’s heart at that news, a surge of emotion he’d thought long gone, like a limb lost to frostbite. He wonders what it means -- if Arya’s back for good, if she and Gendry have run off together, if the six kingdoms have already turned on each other and they're looking to join his life of exile beyond the Wall.

Or, Jon realizes horribly, belatedly, perhaps it means something truly awful has happened.

He moves then, mounting the horse with barely a word of thanks to Tormund, riding faster then he has in too long to remember. Urgency is something that feels foreign after all this time roaming, and he tells himself that’s why his heart is hammering at the backsides of his ribs until it hurts to breathe.

After days or maybe hours, he passes through the gate at Castle Black and there she is -- forever the smallest and mightiest presence in a crowd of lesser men. She smiles when she sees him, though, and his panic abates, something inside him threatening to thaw.

It’s been a long time, but it was longer last time, he remembers. Even still, Arya leaps into his arms, and he catches her, just like he used to when they were children. Jon holds her tight for a long moment, wishing hopelessly for the time before they had scars on their faces and swords on their hips

“ _Arya_.” He smiles as her name scratches from his throat, and she returns it for a half-second before her face twists back like she’s smelling something foul.

“You look like pure shit.”

It only makes him smile wider. “It's good to see you, too.”

The gash above her eye has faded slightly, but he sees the angry pink pucker of a new one on the right underside of her jaw and fights a brotherly urge to hook a finger beneath her chin and tut at her for whatever it is she’s gotten into this time.

But when he looks over Arya’s shoulder to see Gendry standing proudly, he knows he’s not the only one looking out for her. It’s more comfort than he’s used to, and it feels odd in his chest. Still, he turns his smile on the other man, reaching out to clap a friendly hand to his arm.

“Good to see you too, my Lord.” Gendry rolls his eyes at the title. Jon remembers the feeling.

“So,” he asks, turning back to Arya, “did you find out what’s west of Westeros?”

She nods, with another grin. This one, though, flickers away too quickly for his liking. “Some of it, anyway.”

“And?”

“It’s...interesting.” Her eyes dart to the space behind her and back again, and Gendry stands up a little straighter. “But it doesn’t really hold a candle to what’s here.”

It’s not quite an answer, but it may be the best he can hope to get. It's sweet, to see her that sentimental, and more than that, Jon’s as happy as he’s been in years to have her safely back in the North.

“No candles to you, though. I’m afraid you’d catch.” Arya wrinkles her nose at him again. “What in seven hells have you been doing up here?”

“Haven’t been here, really,” he admits. “Mostly been up beyond the Wall.”

“I can see that,” she sneers, like he's somehow missed the other hints about his unkempt appearance. “You’re a true wildling now, are you? King of the Free Folk?”

“I’m not King of anything,” he bites back. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”

She glances around the yard then, letting the truth in his admission return things to a simmer. “What happened to Ghost?”

“Haven't seen him in a few moons.” Truthfully, Jon’s started to worry a little -- it’s the longest his wolf has ventured away since they returned to the Wall. So his next assurance may be as much for himself as it is for her. “He always makes his way back to where he needs to be.”

Arya quirks an eyebrow at that, and then gives him a sad look he assumes is either for him or Nymeria, wherever she may be.

“The lone wolf dies, Jon.” Ned Stark’s words have rung in his ears a few times in the last year, but they sound more dire coming from his daughter’s mouth. “You need your pack.”

“Yes, the lone wolf dies,” he agrees, and the spite and conflict inside him call back a different warning -- one he heard years ago at this very castle, “and a Targaryen alone in the world is a terrible thing.”

 

* * *

 

What’s left of the Castle Black kitchen does their best to throw something together for the Night Kingslayer and the Lord of Storm’s End come suppertime, and the both of them look expectedly embarrassed at even the attempt at ceremony in their honor. They’re a good match, Jon notices, not for the first time, and it makes him wish for another life where they had found each other in happiness, rather than whatever this is.

But his sullen brain betrays him then, wondering if this is the way it always had to be. Perhaps even the old gods saw it coming -- fire and ice and whatever’s left when the ash and snow had settled.

The evening’s mood lifts significantly when Tormund arrives with a small traveling party and a few large horns of ale and fermented goat’s milk to share, and the meager feast becomes a celebration with the lively raucousness of the Free Folk. It doesn’t grate at Jon the way it normally does, and he’s glad for it. He even catches himself smiling, more than once, and knows Tormund spots it too.  

As the night’s dancing begins in earnest, he glances over to see Gendry and Arya deep in conversation. The young lord is nodding his encouragement and placing a comforting hand on top of where hers rests on the table between them, and it warms Jon’s heart even further. But when Arya stands and gathers herself before heading in his direction, dread creeps like ice back into his gut.

“Is there somewhere more private we can speak?” He nods dumbly, and leads the way.

Jon had protested for hours when they presented him with the Lord Commander’s chambers, but none of the men would hear it. He's even more embarrassed now, when they enter his solar and find it just as empty as he did all those moons ago. At least there’s a fire going -- he makes a mental note to thank the stewards for their forethought.

“We’re headed back to Winterfell in the morning.” He didn’t expect her to tiptoe around things, but still, Jon’s heart lurches at Arya’s abrupt announcement. He stops by the window, and doesn’t fully turn back to face her. “You’re coming with us.”

“You know I can’t.” He glances to his near-empty desk and back before he can remember to school his features, but it’s enough for her to follow. Arya crosses quickly, and picks up one of the twelve identical scrolls that sit in a neat line at the top corner of the otherwise empty surface.

“Seven hells, Jon,” she sighs when she unrolls one and then two, realizing what they are. “Are these really the only things you have in this whole bleak chamber?”

He shrugs. It might be sheepish, if that’s something his features can remember. Arya just rolls her eyes again, then narrows them at him.

They’re the only items of value he’s acquired in this last year, the only things he’s found himself with a need to keep. Once a moon, a raven arrives from Winterfell, with a pardon in his name from the Queen in the North. A young, sharp-faced man he keeps accidentally calling Edd used to save them for him, to hand-deliver when he returned from beyond the Wall. After a few turns, though, the lad seemed to realize they wouldn’t be heeded, and began to simply leave the new ones with the old for Jon to find upon his increasingly infrequent returns.

He knows he only saved them because she wrote them herself.

“You’re coming with us, anyway,” Arya repeats. He notices she’s not been posing it as a question. “Special occasion. There’s to be a fancy royal wedding, and you’re invited.”

The name that usually fills his spaces returns then -- only now, instead of a whisper, it’s a roar.

 _Sansa_.

Sansa’s getting married. Sansa’s made herself a proper royal match. Sansa’s going to take another husband, and he’s meant to go and watch it happen.

Jon's not certain when she became the echo in his brain, not certain when his heart had turned, like leaves changing in the fall. But it has.

He’s thought often of all of them, the surviving Starks, but they each mean something different, each occupying a different place within him. Bran is his vision, a reminder to keep more than his eyes open as he travels the wild lands. Arya’s his compass, forever angling towards true North.

And Sansa, she's his heartbeat.

At the start of his exile, the ache in Jon's chest was an unknowable black -- like the charred remains of a fallen city, the scales of a lost dragon or the widening eye of a queen gone mad. Now it’s red -- the last embers of a dying blaze, a pool of blood on an icy stone floor, hair kissed by fire sat beneath an iron crown. Black to red. Perhaps he's more of a Targaryen than he ever thought possible.

The only thing he is sure of anymore is what he sees in his mind’s eye when he thinks of the word “forgiveness.” It’s come to him not infrequently over the past year, and it’s always Sansa, on the dock in King’s Landing, asking if he had any left for her.

He hadn’t given her a proper answer then, still too stupefied by the way his world kept upending itself and yet somehow, never landing him on his feet. He wishes he could have told her that he forgave her the moment Tyrion had told him what she’d done, before he knew if he'd ever see her face again. He wishes he could have stood in the Great Hall when the North crowned her their rightful leader. He wishes he could have mustered the courage to send just one raven back to Winterfell.

It might take him a full minute to realize Arya’s still speaking.

 _“Jon.”_ She sounds exasperated. It’s a tone he remembers well, despite everything. Perhaps it was even longer than a minute. “It’s my wedding. Gendry and I, we’re getting married.”

The sudden relief is so strong he can taste it, sliding thick and intoxicating across his tongue. It renders him stupid with his words -- or in his case, more so than usual. In the time it takes him to cobble together half a sentence, Arya makes her way through twenty or so different expressions, from exhaustion to disbelief to something that almost looks like mischief, and back again.

“What?” he stammers. “Why did you--”

“I needed to see your face,” she answers in that way of hers that only poses more questions.

He swallows heavily, telling himself it’s not a gulp. “Thought you were done with all that.”

“I don’t _wear_ faces anymore,” she half-explains, quirking one side of her mouth up. “Can’t help studying them, though.”

He can only imagine what she’s learned from looking at his just now -- gods, she probably understands more than even he does. A change of subject is his futile attempt to distract them both. “Last I heard, you turned down his offer.”

Arya gives him that look, the one that says she knows he’s being purposefully stupid.

“I'm not the same person that I was a year ago, Jon.” Her tone is obvious, but softer than he expects. “None of us are.”

Nothing's ever been truer than that, has it? A year ago, he was a traitor, a kinslayer, a man whom even death couldn't keep from lining up at the start of each new war. Now he’s not sure if he’s anything more than a lone wolf beyond the Wall.

And Arya, brave and bold, she’s something else now, too.

“You’re going to be a Lady,” he says with a smirk. She doesn’t match it.

“I’m going to be myself. Always. I came back home for what I want, and what I want is to be with Gendry.” This is a practiced speech, one she’s given before. Maybe to Sansa, he thinks idly. “Who’s anyone to say what that has to mean?”

Jon holds a hand up in defense. “I just can’t believe you’re actually marrying.” She sighs again.

“I don't believe that the world owes me anything.” He almost laughs at how wrong she is. Westeros as it still stands owes her everything it has to give. “But change is slow, and our time isn't promised. I'm going to make my life into what I want it to be, and I’m going to fight anyone who tries to stop me.”

It’s hard not to believe in her. He can picture it, Arya sparring with her troops during the day and wrestling her gaggle of wild babes in the evenings. A kingdom led by love and cunning and the strategy of survival. A castle where the Lady carries the swords and the Lord forges them for her.

“There isn’t time enough to stand still, Jon,” Arya adds, softening again. “Or, ride around in circles, or whatever it is you've been doing up here.”

She turns to leave, but he's mulling all of her words over and it takes a while for things to come back into focus. When he does meet her eyes, she’s watching him closely again, and he wants to ask what it is people keep seeing in his expression that gives him away.

“Arya--”

“We’re headed home first thing tomorrow. The three of us.” Then she does smile, finally. “And I'll be expecting a proper congratulations in the morning, you absolute dolt.”

She’s through the door before Jon has the chance to stammer an apology, or his belated well wishes.

He doesn’t sleep that night. He barely even tries, laying down for just a few heartbeats before accepting how futile it will be. Winterfell. Sansa. _Home_. For a brief moment, it’s too much, and he thinks of running, of saddling up and fleeing back through the Wall before Arya can realize he’s gone.

But the feeling passes, quicker than he expects, and a familiar memory returns to take its place.

On his last day in the Red Keep, the Hand of the King had paid a final visit to his cell as he was preparing himself for the journey North. Tyrion didn’t look any happier than he had on the day he handed down the sentence, but his voice was stronger, and his words of advice rang clearer in Jon’s muddled mind.

 _“The most heroic thing we can do now is look the truth in the face.”_ Sansa had said that, Tyrion told him, before pulling a dagger from her cloak and preparing to fight the risen dead in the Winterfell crypts. The image had burned itself on Jon’s brain immediately, but it’s her words that have come back to him time and again as he’s served his time in the far North.

 _“They’ll call you a traitor, Jon Snow, and you may find your only comfort in the knowledge that you are also a hero.”_ Tyrion had spoken with his usual confident calm, though Jon found it brought him little more comfort than it did when they first met. _“That will be your armor now.”_

They had parted ways then, with a familiar nod. Jon didn’t bother mentioning that he was hoping for a life, or even just a few moments, where he didn’t need an iron plate to protect what little was left beating in his chest.

 _Look the truth in the face._ Maybe Arya’s right. Maybe it’s time now.

Newly revitalized, Jon spends the few remaining hours preparing for the trip, as best he can. He takes a proper bath, trims his hair and his beard, freshens up his furs, and packs what he can salvage from the Castle’s meager stores.

When the light of morning finally breaks, he returns to his empty solar and throws eleven of the scrolls into the dying embers of the fire, lingering only to watch them catch. The one he saves -- tucked into his breast pocket as he descends to prepare the horses -- had come a few moons back, with three extra words scrawled at the bottom of the standard pardon.

They were still in Sansa's hand, but scratched slightly sideways -- hasty or frantic or fraught with something else he couldn’t understand. He remembers spending a few selfish moments tracing them over with his finger, as if somehow he’d be able to touch her through the parchment. Now, he presses them close to his heart for the journey back to Winterfell.

_Please come home._

 

* * *

 

He waits until they're a few hours in the ride -- long enough that he won't be able to convince himself to turn back -- before he dares to ask. “Does she know you came?”

“No,” Arya admits. “I’m hoping she’ll be too busy planning to be angry.”

“Angry?” Jon's already beginning to panic at how readily he’d agreed to make the journey, and looks back now to try and catch a glimpse of the Wall, like a comfort. “She’s the one who's been sending me pardons.”

“And still you stayed away.” There’s so much that remains unspoken in that accusation, but it’s nothing Jon hasn’t already leveled at himself.

“I didn’t--” He starts to stammer out an apology that he knows will need some work before they reach Winterfell, but Arya heads him off.

“Jon, you should know. She’s… different now.”

He watches his breath catch in the frosty air, and waits for her to continue. Of course Sansa’s different now. Arya had said it herself, they all are. But he hears the uncertainty in her voice, and knows there’s more she’s trying to tell him.

“She’s a good queen. And she’s still Sansa, in there somewhere. But she’s been all alone for a year. And before that, too. She’s changed.”

Alone. For all Jon has thought about Sansa in the last year, he's never pictured her alone. He’s imagined the Northmen raising their swords to celebrate her reign, pictured her days full of meetings with advisors and lackeys she'd manage with smart precision. But he never thought of her at night, never allowed himself to see her retiring to her chambers, and so he never considered what happens when the Queen in the North becomes Sansa Stark again, for a few hours in front of a private hearth.

He hopes she has people she can trust, people who know her when the crown comes off. But deep down, he realizes that Arya likely speaks the truth. It unsettles him, the thought that she's been just as isolated as he's felt amongst the Free Folk -- surrounded by life and still, so very alone.

“When she sees you,” Arya continues carefully, “she might not--”

“No, I don’t expect she will,” Jon cuts her off before she's even finished her thought, but his bitterness can only be directed inward. He’s spent a year atoning for his sins, but Tyrion had suggested ten -- and even that seemed meager, compared to what he's done. Whatever it is he's seeking at Winterfell, he knows enough at least to understand he doesn’t deserve it.

“It’s not all to do with you, Jon,” Arya fairly snaps, cutting through his brooding. “Are you listening? She's not the same since we left her behind.”

And they did, didn’t they? After those dark, horrific weeks of war, Sansa went home, but no one went with her. She gave everything for her people, and lost what was left of her family in the process.

“Is she alright?”

“I don’t know,” Arya admits, and that might scare him most of all. “I don’t know what it is, exactly. But she's...”

“Some of the smallfolk have taken to calling her ‘Old Stone Jenny,’” Gendry offers.

“And I’ve boxed the ears of anyone I’ve heard say it,” Arya answers fiercely, shooting a glare at her betrothed. “Don’t think I can’t get you, too, even on horseback.”

“Old Stone Jenny?” Jon’s mind feels slushy as he turns over Arya’s warning, looking for clues like worms beneath river rocks, not certain he wants to find them.

“Like the song,” Arya reminds him. Jon only recalls bits and pieces. _The ones who’ve been gone for so very long, she couldn’t remember their names._ “They say she’s made of iron and ice -- still as a statue and surrounded by ghosts.”

“Probably don't help that she spent most of her first year rebuilding the crypts,” Gendry chimes in again, and this time, the look Arya gives him is simple and sad. Jon’s stomach turns over at the thought of Sansa being tasked with laying generations of Starks back to rest -- and building new tombs for the ones who had loved her the most.

He barely knew her as a girl, and so many of his early memories are shrouded now in a thick fog of mortality and blood magic. All of Jon’s thoughts of Sansa are newer ones, from after her escape and his rebirth, when they found each other at the Wall. But it must be even more jarring for Arya, to see how the evils of the world and the pressures of power have forged her a sister so different than the one she once knew.

“We stayed for almost a moon before we came to get you, and she had barely started to thaw by then,” she says sadly, looking off into the distance like it pains her to recall. “Even for me.”

Jon doesn’t have to imagine, there’s still so much he can picture like it’s happening in front of his eyes. “I remember how she was after Ramsey,” he offers as a comfort, though it sends a chill up his spine just to think of it.

He call still see the way Sansa would jump every time one of the doors in Castle Black latched too loudly, remembers the way she’d cower at a stray shout from the yard. When they returned to Winterfell, he would watch her spine go straight when anyone leaned in too close, saw her dig her fingernails into her soft palms when an over-familiar lord would bend to kiss her hand.

“She steels herself, but still she flinches,” he says, almost to himself. Past Arya, he sees Gendry nod in recognition.

“I tried to hug her,” he admits with a shrug. “When we told her about the betrothal.” He doesn’t finish the story. He doesn’t need to.

Jon wonders if there’s a space in the crypts now for everyone who left her. He wonders if there's one for him.

He turns back to Arya, who still seems lost in her thoughts, and decides to leave her be for a while. But after an hour or two more of riding, his curiosity gets the best of him.

“Why did you need to see my face?” He knows she’ll understand what he’s asking. But she just gives him that look like he's being stupid again.

“The last night we were there, she finally started talking,” she tells him, even so. “And then it was like she couldn’t stop. She talked about the past -- about Mother and Father, Robb and Rickon. She talked about how strange it felt to have Bran gone -- even when it used to feel like he wasn’t really there at all.”

The ache in Jon's heart has a name now too, the same one that's been echoing in his mind all this time. How selfish he’s been, to think that he was the one suffering the most.

“She even talked about the future,” Arya keeps on. “She's got a new idea in her head now about heirs for Winterfell, though gods know how _that’ll_ even be possible.”

It's Jon’s turn to flinch at that, and when he glances at Arya, she has a shameful grimace on her face, like she hadn't meant to say that part aloud. Sansa never spoke of it, not to him at least, but another thing he’s never forgotten is the look in her eyes when she told him she wouldn't go back to Ramsey alive.

“Of course, any children Gendry and I have will be Baratheons, not Starks. So, no help there,” Arya spits out, moving past the uncomfortable moment, but her ire is reserved for the lob she aims in Jon’s direction. “A parting gift from your queen.”

To his credit, he barely flinches at the mention of Daenerys. “She’s not anybody’s queen anymore.”

Arya’s eyes narrow at him then. He should have been expecting this, at least. “Yes, and you never told me what changed your mind about that.”

“Something Tyrion said.” It’s all Jon offers. He doesn’t tell Arya that it was she, and not the Hand, who had been the first to make him realize where Dany would set her sights next. He doesn't know how to say it without giving away a truth he’s never looked in the face. “It wasn’t ever going to stop.”

“Sansa knew that.”

He doesn’t need the reminder, but accepts it as part of his penance. “Aye. I should have listened.”

“She never talked about you after we said our goodbyes that day,” Arya picks back up, like she half-knows all of his secrets anyway. “Not then, and not now. It’s like she can’t, or won’t. I thought maybe if you--”

“If I _what_ , Arya?” Jon interrupts, suddenly incensed by the uncertainty of what’s facing him at the end of this ride. He can't save anyone, he never could. All of his efforts seem to end in failure and flames. He starts to say as much, but Arya won't hear it.

“You’ve been up there torturing yourself, and she’s been doing the same down here. The world’s moving on in peacetime, and somehow, the two smartest people I know are still at war.”

Jon just sighs. There’s little relief in her insight, not when it seems like her solution lies on the other side of his most daunting battle yet.

“I knew I had to bring you back to her,” Arya adds, softly. “I’m just not sure what’s going to happen when I do.”

It’s the most straightforward she’s been with him about anything. As the gates of Winterfell come into view, Jon only wishes it came as more of a comfort.

 

* * *

 

He hears Sansa’s voice before he sees her.

She’s in the Great Hall, discussing logistics of the upcoming celebrations with one lord or another, when they arrive. Jon's grateful for Arya’s plan to sneak in and avoid the fanfare of an official entrance, because it affords him a few moments to take her in candidly, as the Queen in the North.

He sneaks in the servants’ entrance in the back, down the narrow hallway he and Robb used to duck into to sneak nips of wine during feasts, several lifetimes ago.

Jon can't make out the words at first, but even just the overtones of her cadence echoing against the familiar granite soothe him in a way that shouldn’t be possible. He’s longed for that voice, he realizes just how strongly as it washes over him once again.

And then he sees her.

She’s as beautiful as he remembers, and so much more, red hair cascading across her Stark grey dress with a black wolf draped over her shoulder. She wears a crown like she was born for it -- she _was_ , his stupid brain whispers -- and sits in the direwolf throne like it’s the only place she’s ever truly belonged. The rightness of it all brings Jon a sense of peace he’s never felt before.

She looks like everything he’s been yearning for and nothing he was expecting. She looks like the kind of queen they’ll run out of parchment writing songs about.

She looks so beautiful, Jon almost forgets to hate himself for thinking so much of it.

He tries to be as stealthy as possible -- no one else in the hall seems to notice his arrival -- but as soon as Sansa concludes her business with the lord, sending him away with a beatific but fleeting smile, her eyes turn to lock on his.

 _“Jon.”_ She says his name softly, but it rings in his ears, and then there’s nothing left for him to do but present himself officially. He walks on shaky legs to stand before her, ignoring the mumbles that start to fill the hall as the Northmen recognize his presence.

He means to call her “Your Grace” or “My Lady.” Even just her name would have been better. But the new honorific rolls off his tongue, like something he’s been waiting to say his whole life.

“My Queen.”

He knows he’s watching too closely, because he catches the ways her blue eyes widen a little. But she doesn't say another word until he moves to drop to his knee.

“ _Don’t--_ ”

It's so soft, he wonders if he imagined it, but when he glances up to meet her eyes, Sansa looks almost pained. It only lasts a second, though, before she’s straightening her shoulders and sharpening her voice to a command. “Please, stand.”

Jon has no idea what's happened, and the rest of the hall seems equally frozen in confusion as he rights himself before their queen. Is she going to throw him out? Tear up his pardon and send him back to the Wall? Is she truly that unhappy that he's come?

Or, Jon wonders, meeting Sansa’s eyes again as a flash of something hot curls in his belly, is it that she can't stand to see him on the ground before her without thinking of the last queen for whom he bent the knee?

He only realizes the silence between them has stretched on too long when it’s broken by a flash of white fur that brushes right past her side before bounding down to where Jon stands awkwardly.

“Ghost!” Jon crouches down to pet him, glancing to his left to seek out Arya, who gives him a knowing look that nearly makes him scowl in return. But he’s too glad to see his companion alive and well to mind much that her question at Castle Black had been some kind of test. “I should have known this is where you’d be.”

The wolf’s ear has healed nicely, and the patches left over from the Battle of Winterfell have filled in as best they can. Jon glances up from greeting him and catches Sansa very nearly smiling at them, but it doesn’t last.

“He’s been here for a few moons.” Her eyebrows furrow and she comes as close to a frown as he thinks she’ll allow herself. “I thought--”

She doesn’t allow herself to finish the idea out loud, but Jon understands all the same. She’d thought he sent him. She’d thought the wolf was his way of being with her when he couldn’t.

Gods, he’d give anything in the world to be able to tell her she was right.

“No.” Awe and regret flood him in equal measure as he shakes his head at the beast, who looks positively docile as he returns to sit at the queen’s right-hand side. “But it seems like he knew where he needed to be.”

In the past, Jon likes to think, something like that would have broken through the ice between them. But Sansa sits stoic and still, looking almost through him. The only evidence that she's not a statue from the song is her hand reaching up to card calmly through Ghost’s fur.

For a moment, she seems so much to him like Lady Catelyn -- or perhaps it's just that he feels that same nagging sense of failure that had always followed the Bastard of Winterfell around this very hall. _Iron and ice,_ Arya had said.

“Will you be staying for the wedding?” the Queen in the North asks him then, casually, as though she doesn't care either way. Her voice that has crystallized back to the formal. It's impossible to remember how he believed he wasn't going to ruin this

“Of course.” Jon almost smiles, looking over at where Arya stands, Gendry positioned just behind her. But they’re both watching Sansa, with expressions that betray more worry than he thinks they would probably want.

All she gives any of them is the slightest of nods, turning back to Jon with that same fake smile she gave the lord before him. He feels ill with how wrong this has gone so quickly, but she allows no time to fix it. “I’ll have someone show you to your chambers. Winterfell welcomes you.”

And that's that.

The corridors of the Great Keep seem colder than he remembers, and the servant, whom he doesn’t recognize, won’t look him in the eye as she walks him towards his old chamber. There’s barely more than a bed, a chair, a set of drawers, and the sound of his rattled breath echoing around the room, but it still feels more like home than the quarters he left behind at Castle Black.

That’s a dangerous thought, and Jon shoves it away with the others. He tells himself it’s exhaustion and delusion that has him smelling lemon and lavender -- there would be no reason for her to have been here -- and presses his fists to his eyes, suddenly and utterly drained by the journey and the loss of a hope he didn't even realize he was still carrying.

Just as he moves to close and latch the door and the day behind him, though, he hears a rustle in the corridor and then, _gods_ , his name in that voice again.

“ _Jon_.” There’s a flush to Sansa’s cheeks as she materializes before him. But she couldn't have rushed after him -- that wouldn’t befit a queen.

He clutches at the door frame as he takes her in, like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. “Your Gr--”

“Jon, _please,_ ” she whispers before he can finish, and suddenly he's back to being the man who can deny her nothing, from his mug of ale to a battle fought in their family's name.

She's right in front of him now, not up on some untouchable throne, and it's easier and harder all at the same time. He can see the uncertainty written across her face, the way her pulse flutters at the slope of her neck. Her hair is different than he's ever seen it, straight and smooth, but still stunning in his eyes, and he takes in a painful breath when he notices the direwolf detailing on her crown. Muddled as she makes him, though, his lips know just what to call her.

“ _Sansa_.” Her eyes well up as he says her name, and his grow misty as well. He wants to pull her into his arms, to bury his face in the fur that drapes across her shoulders, but Arya's warnings are clear in his mind and so he leaves his arms at his sides, hands balling into fists.

“I’m sorry,” she says then, and he assuages her worry in an instant, though he hasn't the faintest idea what she's apologizing for.

“It’s alright.”

“I didn’t even know what to _call_ you in there.” She sounds baffled by what was barely a blunder. He wonders if it’s the first she’d made in a year on the throne. It wouldn’t surprise him in the least. “I was surprised, I didn't meant to--”

“Sansa, it’s alright,” he says again, unable to stop saying her name after such a drought and unable to keep a smile from his face she steps past him into the room. “I’ve had about enough of titles to last me a lifetime. It’s good to be nobody once again.”

She turns on him, pursing her lips at that, and he tries not to stare at them for too long. But then her hand comes up to cup his cheek and Jon’s breathing stutters to a stop. He can’t remember if she was wearing gloves in the hall, but if she was, they're gone now. He tries and fails to suppress a shiver at the feel of her skin on his, from the slight chill of her fingertips to the warmth of her palm.

“You’re _not_.” His eyes slide open to meet hers at the fierce words. He hadn't realized that he'd closed them. “You’re not nobody, you never were.”

Here she is, the women he remembers. Not the queen on the throne, but the last Stark in Winterfell -- the best of all of them. She’s fierce like Arya, brave like Robb, wise like Bran and wild like Rickon. She’s _everything_ , and she just gives it away like this.

“It’s good to see you, Sansa.” Jon knows he can’t give her much, but he can give her the truth. “I--”

He pauses and she draws in a breath, leaving the air too thin between them. There's a million things to say here, and he can't find one, suddenly lost in the familiar blue of her gaze.

“It’s just very good to see you,” he repeats, and he sees the smile in her eyes before it touches her lips, but he’s still not ready for the way it makes his entire chest seize up.

The hand on his cheek snakes around his neck and then she’s hugging him, fully and fiercely. He follows her lead, banding his arms around her back, trying not to notice how a sound that might be a sob escapes from where there once was space between them. The hunger and fatigue and anxiousness of his journey fade away in her embrace. Every question he has about past, present and future can wait. Holding her is the only thing there is.

They’re wrong about Sansa, they all are. Jon was sure of it the moment Arya tried to tell him, and he's even more certain now. There’s nothing stone in the soft curves under his hands, no ice in the hot breath that puffs against his neck. There are no ghosts in this keep tonight, there's only life in the words she presses into his cloak as their arms pull each other tighter.

“I'm so glad you're home.”

* * *

 

_A/N: I’ve never been much good at multi-chaps, but I’m hoping this one has at least one more in it, from Sansa’s POV, if people are into it. Thanks for reading, and come say hey on[Tumblr](https://theshipsfirstmate.tumblr.com/post/185228771879/game-of-thrones-fic-please-speak-well-of-me)!_


	2. You Recognize Love After the Fact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve heard the speech,” Sansa tells him. “But you and I both know it’s different when there’s a crown on your head.”
> 
> “I never wore a crown,” Jon answers, needlessly.
> 
> “I know,” she nods, wringing her hands nervously, but unable to look away – or stop herself from admitting, “That’s why there are two wolves on mine.”

_A/N: I know this follow-up is like, a year late, but I’m trying to clear out my WIPs and this one was mostly done and I’m pretty pleased with it. Anybody still around?_

**Part 2: You Recognize Love After the Fact**

Jon says her name, standing in front of her in his old chambers, and she thinks it might be the first thing she’s really heard in over a year. **  
**

_“Sansa.”_  It’s like seeing in color after months of nothing but white and grey.

Part of her thought the world would be louder, ruling in the ashen aftermath of the Mad Queen. She thought the crown on her head would bring with it a diplomatic din, a ceaseless chorus of concerns calling to her to be handled.

And it’s true, there are voices that reach out from all sides throughout her day, and a few from the past that come to her in her empty chambers at night. There are survivors whose lives she has been tasked with rebuilding, and lost generations to whom she is desperate to construct proper monuments. But the noise so far has been muted, and manageable, as if the veil she dropped over her countenance the moment she took her seat on the North’s wooden throne was also designed to muffle the sounds of the outside world.

It’s lonely, too. The silence has been her penance, she thinks, for growing spoiled once again by having her siblings close by. Their time at Winterfell before the war was fleeting and fraught with paranoia and planning, but it was enough to remind her what it was like to have a family once again. It was enough to know what she was missing when she returned home from King’s Landing alone – without Arya, without Bran, without Brienne or Podrick or Sandor. Without  _Jon_.

Her people have accepted her, are grateful for her role in freeing the North and establishing independence, but it’s never left her mind for a moment that she was the ruler they were left with, not the one they chose – the last remaining Stark at Winterfell.

Perhaps fittingly, she has become something of a lone wolf. She keeps to herself as much as possible, taking her meals alone – or, since their return, with Arya and Gendry – and politely shunning any advisors who attempt to cross the line into something friendly or more familiar. And the quieter she becomes, the more she hears how they speak of her. Granite, they say. Stone and ice and steel. But at least those things are strong.

She is the only one now who can know the truth of how weak she is, Sansa knows that much for certain. A queen isn’t supposed to mourn her family, scattered across the map – not when her kingdom has so recently been winnowed by the army of the dead. A queen isn’t supposed to pass through empty chambers in her keep, hoping to catch the scent of someone who used to sleep there.

A queen isn’t supposed to cry. So she’s learned to turn her tears to frost before they ever reach her cheeks.

“ _Sansa_ ,” Jon says to her, and the ice within shifts, weakens. Brackish water begins to leak through the cracks.

She can barely remember how to speak, and it doesn’t come as much of a comfort that he seems to be fumbling as well.

Over the foolish moons, Sansa had imagined that, if the time came that Jon ever returned, the mere sight of him would unwind the tangles of conflict inside of her. There would be something in his eyes, something she had forgotten about his face, something that would remind her what was real and what was not between the two of them.

She understands now that this was all wishful thinking. The knot in her chest only twisted tighter when he stepped before her in the Great Hall, wrapping more inextricably around what’s left of her heart, and she’s not sure it’s something she’ll ever be able to untangle.

“It’s just very good to see you,” he says finally, on a breath, and there’s a flash of something in his gaze that makes her wonder if he’s just as conflicted as she. His face is thinner now, and the shadows under his eyes are darker still than after his stay in the Red Keep. But there’s something else about seeing him before her, something that tugs at the corners of her lips. It takes her far too long to recognize it as joy.

He keeps himself so still, hands balled into fists at his sides, waiting for her to reach for him. Mercifully, the second she moves, Jon does too, arms banding around her as she sucks in a breath that leaves her lightheaded.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” Sansa whispers when she trusts her voice not to break, speaking the words into the worn furs at his collarbone. 

When she pulls back, reluctant to even let him slip a few inches away, his eyes are sad but sparkling still, and he brings a careful hand up to cup her face.

“Sansa.” Again, just her name. But it sounds like something more.

It’s why she had fumbled over their introduction in the Great Hall, why she recoiled when he addressed her as queen. This is the only thing she ever wants him to call her.

She spends so much time replaying it in her head, it takes her a long moment to notice that he doesn’t say anything more. He’s just looking at her. All of her at once, it seems. His eyes dart from her face to her cloak, around the room and back again. But his mouth seems to stick on anything but syllables of her name.

“What is it?”

“It’s just…” The sentence comes in fits and starts, and part of her wants to plead with him to simply say what he means. And then he does. “I’ve spent so much time wondering if I’d ever see anything good come of all that’s happened. But that crown on your head…”

She ducks her eyes to his boots, unwilling to let him see the tears or anything else that might spring to her eyes. Jon pulls his hand back to his side and she misses it instantly.

“Gendry made it for me,” she tells him. “I wanted something for Robb. And Father. And the rest…”

“It’s perfect,” he answers with a nod and a near-whisper. His eyes go soft and she imagines he must be thinking of their fallen family. “It’s beautiful. You’re– You make a beautiful queen.”

His breath catches in the space between them, and Sansa goes a bit light-headed herself. It’s so much, to have him here. It’s been so long since she made a wish that had even the smallest chance of coming true.

“I should– They’ll be looking for me.” She nods to the door, and Jon responds with a tiny, terse flash of a smile. It’s just his lips, pressed together in a line, but she tries to memorize it. “I’ll send for you at supper?”

He doesn’t answer right away, so she assures, “Nothing formal. Arya and Gendry usually eat with me in my solar.”

Jon looks so relieved she can’t help but smile at him again. Her cheeks, out of practice, are starting to ache.

“Just family,” she adds, and then the look is more than relief.  _Joy_ , she remembers again. That’s what it’s called.

 

* * *

 

“I’ve decided to take Gendry’s name after all.”

Sansa knows Arya will be annoyed at her sigh, but she can’t help the consolation she feels at checking one minor battle off of her ever-growing list. “Oh?” 

Wedding planning with her sister has been about as easy as she expected, which is to say, very near agony. Arya is a specific mix of practical and desperate to buck tradition that has called into question nearly every detail of a traditional Northern wedding celebration. And besides that, she’s marrying a Southern lord.

“The tradition is demeaning, but times are slow to change,” Arya tells them of her latest decision. “I’ll take his name to protect our family, but I will always be a Stark.”

Sansa grins at the flash of her sister’s Tully blood, still running cool beneath a face that undeniably belongs to their father. Gendry smiles as well.

“No one who looks upon you would doubt that,” he assures his bride-to-be, even though it earns him a swat to the arm. “And if they did, you would be quick to set them straight, my lady.”

“I’m not your lady yet,” Arya warns.

“Aye, but soon enough,” her betrothed fires back. “You’ll be my lady  _and_  my family.”

Sansa expects another blow to Gendry’s side, but instead her sister goes soft, eyes widening with the most sentimental look she’s ever seen shape the practical angles of her face.

It’s some happy moment, something from their past, she understands. Arya’s told her some of their stories and more than anything, Sansa finds herself grateful that they had each other for a time, grateful that her sister can hold her life’s memories up to the light and catch the gleam of happiness off of some of them. 

She knows something of the depths of Arya’s affection for Gendry, but this may be the first time she’s ever truly seen her sister as a woman in love. It pulls at Sansa’s heartstrings and something in a darker part of her as well, something that feels too much like jealousy to dwell on for very long.

She looks away, aiming to afford the couple a semi-private moment, but this leaves her eyes to find Jon’s, which soften at the corners, like they’re sharing a secret too. She can’t linger there either, so she racks her brain for a distraction – and settles on a weak one.

“You’re sure about the godswood?” she asks, focusing on what’s left of her stew.

“Seven hells, Sansa,  _yes_.” Arya manages to project her annoyance while keeping her eyes fixed on Gendry for a moment. When she turns back, her whole face narrows suspiciously in her sister’s direction. “Why do you keep asking?”

“It’s just–” Sansa chooses her words carefully. “It’s very traditional.”

“I think it’ll make it feel like father’s there,” her sister explains, casually, like it doesn’t rip the breath from her chest. “Mother, as well. It’s what they would have wanted.”

Sansa can feel herself freezing over, despite the fire that roars in the hearth of her solar.  _And when did you decide to care what they wanted for Winterfell?_  She doesn’t let the ugly voice in the back of her mind ask its question aloud, but she can’t find anything else to say.

“Aye, it is,” Jon finally fills in, and Arya smiles gratefully at him.

“Besides,” she continues, either oblivious to Sansa’s reaction or pretending to be, “Bran will be more comfortable there.”

“Bran’s coming?” Jon’s worry is what finally thaws Sansa enough to find her voice.

“Not to worry,” she says, clearing her throat. “I’ll speak to him – as a queen to a king, and as a sister to a brother. ” 

“I don’t want to cause any trouble.” A quick flash of panic passes between them, and Sansa imagines an empty chair at the dining table tomorrow, like he was never here at all.

“You won’t,” she says resolutely, and thankfully, Arya echoes the same. It seems to be enough to pacify Jon for the moment.

They finish their meal in peaceful silence, but all three of Sansa’s guests take note when she does her best to stifle a yawn.

“Would you two mind giving us the room?” Four eyes turn towards her with the same question. “I’d like a word with my sister.”

Gendry’s already standing to take his leave, ever courteous. “Goodnight, Your Grace,” he says with a smile. Arya rolls her eyes, but Sansa gives him her warmest blessing.

“Goodnight, my lord.” She’ll insist on first names after the wedding, she’s already decided. “I must thank you again for bringing more of my family back to me.”

He’s a good man, her sister’s betrothed, solid and sure. He balances Arya in a way that Sansa counts as a blessing, even as she doesn’t fully understand it. And best of all, he’s kind.

“We two were never meant to head our houses, but we’ll do our best, won’t we?” It’s their private joke, however morbid, forged over the last year as they found themselves in similar chaos. Sansa does her best not to watch Jon from the corner of her eye as she nods.

“Our families have been friends and allies for generations,” she tells him. “It’s an honor to have you join us, officially.”

Gendry departs with a sheepish grin, and then she’s forced to turn her attention back to her remaining guests. Perhaps foolishly, she chooses Jon, who’s watching her like he’s seeing something different as the embers in the hearth begin to dwindle. 

Sansa’s stomach twists, not with discomfort, she realizes, but worry. She fears letting him out of her sight for the evening will give him permission to disappear, to prove himself the hopeful apparition part of her still believes him to be.

He must sense her concern, or see it on her face, because he doesn’t move to follow Gendry out the door. “All right, Sansa?”

 _Perhaps,_ she thinks.  _If you’re still here when the sun rises tomorrow, I might be._   “Yes, thank you,” she forces out instead, with a smile she hopes is stronger than it feels. “Goodnight, Jon.”

He doesn’t say anything more, just nods and takes his leave. When Sansa turns back from the closing door, Arya’s already opening her mouth, ready to spar. She assumes it’ll be more wedding details, but then her sister’s face changes and her eyes narrow slightly.

“You’re already different.” 

“Different?”

“Now that he’s back,” Arya says, like it’s simple. Like it’s an answer.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

Sansa sighs, for what feels like the hundredth time today.  _Fine_. “Perhaps I am,” she allows, though the forced innocence in her tone is heavy with a thousand possible implications. “Is it so wrong, that I should be happy to see my family returned to me?”

“Of course not.” Her sister gives her a knowing smile that makes her feel small, and seen, and she nearly dismisses her outright, but in a moment of weakness – or strength, it’s hard to be certain – remembers her initial intention.

“I don’t want to quarrel,” Sansa says softly, eyes drifting back to the door Jon walked though just moments ago. “I just wanted to thank you. I know he’s here for you – for your wedding – but once again, you did what I could not.”

She’s not sure what reaction she expected from her sister, but it’s not the one she delivers.

“Mine was the easy task, compared to yours,” Arya answers low, looking almost nervous.

“And what is it that I must do?”

“Convince him to stay.” 

Sansa imagines the look she gives her sister could be called skeptical at best. Incredulous is probably closer. “He will if you ask,” Arya insists.

“I  _have_.” Sansa ducks her head from her sister’s gaze as she answers too quickly, remembering the hastily scribbled missive at the bottom of one of his pardons, a few moons back. “I have asked.”

_Please come home._

She regretted it as soon as the raven took off. Were she a better archer, she would have tried to down the bird as it flew over the battlements. It was desperate, and unbecoming of a queen, but she found that she couldn’t help herself as she signed that month’s decree. Something deep in her gut had flushed her cheeks and moved her hand and still, it wasn’t enough. 

But her sister is the stubborn sort, always has been. “Ask him again.”

“I sent him a dozen pardons, Arya.” And then, childishly, because this particular spat feels like pressing a thumb down on an already-purpled bruise. “I’ve asked him a dozen times, more than.  _You_  ask him.”

“No, it can’t be me.” She remains cryptic as always, and Sansa is weary of so much of it. “It has to be you.”

Her regal composure has held for so long today, but the last of it snaps as she considers what feels like an impossible task. It’s not as if she hadn’t thought of it. It had been her first dreadful question amid the joy of realizing Jon had really returned:  _When will he leave again?_

“What do you imagine I can do, Arya? The weakest of the wolves — what powers do you expect I have here?”

Her sister doesn’t answer right away, hanging on something Sansa hadn’t intended to say. “You don’t really believe that.”

She does. Not only that, she knows it to be true.  _The weakest of the wolves._  She’s heard it in murmurs, most of them in her own head. Every day, there are moments when she wishes she were her brother, with the ability to see through to the meaning of things, or her sister, with the power to glean motives as easily as faces. Or  _Jon_ , with his strong shoulders to carry the weight of the world, and a head made for a crown. 

He returned to Winterfell all those years ago with a bastard’s name, a broken oath and blood that had already once run cold, and still, they raised their swords to him. Sansa’s been queen for longer than he was king, yet there is not one day she hasn’t felt like an imposter.

“I’m just one person, Arya, with one life and one face and wits that I’m learning far too often are not enough.” Her voice sounds small to her own ears, muffled by thoughts of ledgers and lords and all the tedious things that seem to undermine the grand title she’s had bestowed upon her.

“I couldn’t even make him come home,” she whispers, as an unspoken refrain echoes in her mind. It’s something she’s told her sister once before, as they stood atop the snowy battlements of their home.  _You did that. I couldn’t. You did._

“You’re not just a person,” Arya says, in a tone Sansa is growing more resentful of by the second. “You’re a queen.”

“And I have pardoned him, and I have asked him, and I have-” Sansa cuts herself off and takes a deep breath before going so far as to admit that she’s spent most of her nights bargaining with the old gods and the new, and restless hours dreaming of Jon’s safe return. “Why is it that you suddenly think I’ll be able to change his mind now?”

“Faces don’t lie.”

Usually, Sansa feels out of her depth when Arya mentions her mysterious game. But tonight, she just scoffs at a truth she’s more certain of than anything.

“Faces lie all the time. You know that better than anyone.”

“Not yours,” her sister says knowingly, and Sansa can hear her own heart thud in her chest over the scrape of Arya’s chair as she stands to take her leave. “And not his.”

 

* * *

 

She’s left so unsettled that it takes her a moment to notice Arya has left the door ajar. When Sansa sighs, and moves to close it, however, a flash of red catches her eyes in the corridor.

“ _Ghost_.” And behind him, to her immediate relief, “Jon.”

She wishes, in that moment, that she could read faces like her sister. There’s always been something in the way that Jon looked at her, ever since their time at Castle Black, but it feels different now.  _More_ , a voice in her head whispers, and she tries to stifle it.

Ultimately, though, it’s his words that stop her breath.

“The godswood,” he says, almost at a whisper. She steps back to let him reenter the room without another word.

They haven’t laid eyes on each other in more than a year and still he can see right through her. She stays quiet long enough that it serves as an answer.

“Hells, Sansa, why not just tell her?” She nearly laughs, but the thought is too bitter. 

“Arya wants what she wants. She has so many good memories of this place, I won’t give her any of my bad ones.” Her sister knows too much already about her years as a victim, and besides, it wouldn’t become a queen to talk of such horrors.

“She would understand,” he insists. “You know she would.”

But Sansa’s tired of this fight. She’s waged it silently within herself too many times. Seeing Jon’s pitying eyes doesn’t do anything to make it better.

“I will be fine, Jon. I have grown accustomed to ignoring unhappy thoughts. I will not stand in front of my lord father’s people and their gods and think of my own miserable wedding day, or Theon’s death, or a promise that I couldn’t keep.”

His eyes go wide at that – she knows he had only been thinking of Ramsey. “Sansa…”

“I won’t apologize for it. But I know you haven’t forgiven me.” She had sworn to him, in front of what was left of her family, on their most sacred ground. And even as she said the words, she was preparing the plan in her head to betray them. It haunts her still, but it’s a ghost she can manage. It saved them all, as best it could.

“I–”

Nothing becomes of the sentence, and Jon’s silence confirms her suspicions. He might never forgive her, and that’s something else to live with. It only feels sharper now because he’s here. That’s what she tells herself.

“I’m grateful that you came for Arya, but I won’t–”

“I didn’t come for her,” he interrupts, finding his words and seeming startled by their force. Now it’s Sansa’s turn to be speechless.

“Not only for her,” he fumbles over the correction as she takes in a sharp breath. “Though she does seem fairly determined these days about a person’s right to get what they want.” 

 _And what do you want?_  Sansa doesn’t ask it, but she almost does – and that’s dangerous enough.

“I’ve heard the speech,” she says instead. “But you and I both know it’s different when there’s a crown on your head.”

“I never wore a crown.”

“I know,” she nods, wringing her hands nervously, but unable to look away – or stop herself from admitting, “That’s why there are two wolves on mine.”

His eyes flash at the admission, something hot and mournful and dangerous.

She wonders if it’s wrong, to stand here with him like this. It feels like it might be, even more so than it did earlier. The keep is quieting around them, leaving a stillness she rarely gets to enjoy. And when Jon’s eyes reflect the fiery glints from the flickering hearth, it feels very much like something that could sweep her away, if she gave it permission. Perhaps even if she didn’t.

It’s not a question of whether or not she loves him, Sansa realizes then. It’s a question of whether or not she always has – and what it means.

Ice and stone, they say. Suddenly she doesn’t feel so solid.

 

* * *

 

Perhaps Sansa should be surprised at how easily Jon fits back into life at Winterfell, given everything that’s happened. But deep down, she knows that she’s not.

She sees him sparring with Arya in the yard, as dozens of green boys and hopeful squires look on in awe. She notices the bond he forms with Gendry, the way the two men jest with each other – lighthearted familiarity that can only come in peacetime. She watches him as he walks the battlements and dines in the Great Hall and sits in with her small council meeting, and sometimes she nearly cries with the relief of it all.

This is where he belongs. The longer he stays, the more the rightness sinks into her bones. It’s a dangerous feeling, but she loses the will to fight it when he catches her looking and flashes a crooked grin. It’s almost as if he always knows just where she’ll be.

Then one day, as they enjoy a quiet lunch together in her solar – her head spinning with unspoken thoughts, but somehow also comfortable in the peace – Jon asks to see the crypts.

Sansa swallows an empty bite, takes a deep breath and nods.

She cancels her afternoon and they descend the steps together, torches in hand. Despite her layers of fur, she still has to fight back the shiver.

The work is admirable, it’s impossible to say otherwise. She owes a great debt to the masons and laborers who put in countless hours of tiring work to erase the evidence of that horrific night and rebuild her family’s historic monuments.

“I avoided it for a few moons, because I couldn’t stop having nightmares,” she tells Jon, nearly at a whisper, when they reach the bottom of the staircase. “But the more it was rebuilt, the more I was able to sleep.”

He doesn’t speak until they reach her father’s statue, the starting point of a new family bloc. “They’d be so proud of you, Sansa. All of them.”

 _Are you?_  The list of questions she won’t let herself ask him only continues to grow.

They pass by her mother – whom Sansa still has trouble looking at directly – and come to a stop in front of two of the new busts, likenesses Jon hasn’t seen in years. The eldest Stark son and the youngest, resting too early under stone.

She hears a choked kind of sound next to her, and wonders if he’s picturing a wolf pup next to Robb, as she often does.

But when she turns to look, his focus is on Rickon, and his eyes are filled with tears that spill over when he speaks. “I nearly had him, Sansa. I nearly–” 

It’s hard for her to pick that awful day out from the rest, but she knows it must be so vivid for him, who came so close. She grasps his hand in her own free one, and brings it down between them. He turns to her with a question in his eyes – she wonders if he even realizes he was reaching out.

“There was a moment I thought I might have them build him older,” Sansa recalls. “But there were no sculptors who had seen him since he was so small, and I couldn’t…It’s not–”

She loses the word “fair” in her tears and Jon squeezes her hand as they fall. She doesn’t let go to wipe them away.

It’s quiet for a long moment, and then he asks, “Do you think he would have looked like Robb?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I dream of him sometimes, but I can’t picture him as a man.” There’s something so much more profound in that loss.

“Nor Robb,” Jon adds. “I once thought of him as a man grown, when we all left, but he was younger than I am now.”

“Me as well,” she answers. 

There are four spaces left in the plot. Sansa wonders if Jon counts them off as they walk deeper into the tomb, setting their torches to rest in the wall sconces. The last of the Starks. This is where they too will lie one day.

She knows it’s foolish to have a plan. Arya’s likely to die on some remote corner of the map, her body consecrating a life lived on the point of a needle.

Bran may never return either. Is a king permitted to come home when he reigns no longer? Is a Three-Eyed Raven ever laid to rest?

Jon, as it turns out, is ready to answer for himself. He drops her hand when they reach the final marker and she closes it to a fist, digging her fingernails into her palm when his voice comes low and mournful.

“I don’t belong down here, Sansa. Just like I never belonged up there.” He says it as if it’s a fact. “I may deserve the grave, again, but I don’t deserve to rest among the Starks. Not as I am.”

“As you are?” She wills her voice to strengthen as she speaks. “You are a Stark. You are our family, just as much as any of the rest. You belong at Winterfell.”

“But I’m not.” Sansa feels her cheeks redden as his stubbornness draws from her more anger than sorrow. “I’m not a Stark, and I never was.”

Behind him, the statue of her father shows her the falsehood in Jon’s claim, in the slope of his nose, the set of his chin. But he can’t see what she sees.

“I’m a  _Targaryen_ , and a kinslayer at that.” He sounds as if the words are sour on his tongue. “There is madness in my bones and blood on my hands, and I don’t deserve–”

“I know you loved her,” Sansa tells him with a jaw she wills not to clench, “but you didn’t have a choice, Jon.” 

“Loved her?” he scoffs. She takes a breath to steady herself. This is not how she had imagined this particular conversation, or where.

“I know you feel you should suffer for what you’ve done-”

“Look what becomes of the people that love me,” he interrupts, waving an outstretched hand, voice darker than the tomb around them. Sansa thinks it sounds like an accusation. “She trusted me with her heart and I put a dagger through it.”

“And my only regret – as should be yours – is that you didn’t do it sooner.” She can’t find it in her to care if the words come out spiteful. She doesn’t want to speak of Daenerys. Not ever, but certainly not here.

Jon’s eyes narrow in the dim firelight. For the first time since his return, he looks at her with something close to anger. “You’re so sure that it was right?” he asks, voice grating against the questions she knows he’s repeated in every quiet moment for the better part of the last year. “That there wasn’t something else that could have been done? That it wasn’t-”

“Yes.” It’s her turn to interrupt. “And I always have been.”

He shakes his head, looking anywhere but at her, and admitting, “I don’t know if I ever will.”

“Then I will be sure for the both of us.” She’s so certain she understands what he’s telling her, so ready to refute his best efforts at self-immolation. “Jon, you saved so many…”

“And what if I did it to save  _one_?” he spits out, and then she’s not certain of anything anymore.

Jon takes a step back like the revelation comes with a physical blow. He’s not wrong, the way she feels it in her chest.

“It was the last arrow Tyrion had in his quiver – and he knew it would hit its mark,” he recalls. “Arya too, she warned me where Daenerys would go next. All they had to do was tell me–”

“Am I to feel guilty for that?” Sansa breathes through her shock. “I don’t think that I will.”

“ _Gods_ , Sansa.” He’s practically hissing now, sucking cold air through his teeth in frustration. It draws her eyes to his mouth and she realizes he’s stepping closer again.

“Why are you so stubborn? What is it that you hope to see in the truth of this? What is it that you hope to prove?”

“I don’t–” Just moments ago, she had known her footing in this conversation, but it’s shifting beneath her now and leaving her stumbling. 

“Why won’t you see me for what I am? Why did you want me to come home?”

It won’t be until much later that she realizes he had called Winterfell “home.” At present, it’s the anger in his demands – the way it assures the darkest parts of her mind that he’d rather be anywhere but here – that finally pushes the tears onto her cheeks. 

“I know who you are,” she reminds him, with a watery waver. “I have shielded you from the Lords of the North and the King in the South. I have rallied troops in your name.”

They have killed for each other, several times over, and the aftermath has turned her to ice and left him full of fiery resentment. The horrifying possibility dawns on her that there may be nothing here left to salvage. Despite her best efforts, despite the deepest truths of her heart – and whatever lies within his own – this could all end in ruin. But still, she’s determined to try.

“I have sent a flock of humiliating ravens, and gods, Jon, if you don’t know by now?” Sansa starts to tremble, and that’s when his countenance shifts. His eyes flash wide and then soften, and he reaches out for her hands, as if to steady her. It only throws her further off balance.

“I have defended you to any and all that raise their concerns, and I will continue to do so, but I do not have the strength to defend you to yourself. Please, I just–”

“ _Sansa_ ,” Jon whispers, taking a step closer and letting their foreheads fall together when her voice catches on a swallowed sob. “I’m sorry.”

They stand there for a long moment, until her frantic heartbeat slows to sync up with his. She can feel his breath when he exhales, it brushes against her lips, and she wonders if it feels anything like it would to kiss him. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and this time she’s entirely not sure what he’s apologizing for.

And she knows it’s impossible, but she tells him anyway. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to stay.”

With that, she gives his hands one final squeeze and gathers her torch to leave quickly, before she can hear him say he won’t.

 

* * *

 

Bran arrives a few days later, with a smaller contingent than she expected. She’s almost relieved to see he still wears the strange, distant countenance of the Three-Eyed Raven. In a way, it suits him even better as king.

Sansa asks to meet with him the very first night, after their welcoming feast, eager to clear the air as quickly as possible. 

“I suppose you know of our visitor.” Jon has kept himself scarce since their conversation in the crypts. It’s been easy enough to tell herself that it was because of the king’s impending arrival.

Bran nods solemnly, betraying nothing of his feelings about his exiled cousin’s return from beyond the Wall.

“I am the Queen in the North,” Sansa recites, though it sounds as if she’s reminding herself, “and I’ve issued a pardon in his name.”

“His name,” Bran echoes, with that far-away voice she’s still not entirely used to. “A name he longed to be rid of all his life. And now, under the weight of so many others, he longs for it back.”

Sansa realizes she had never considered writing any other on the desperate scraps of paper she sent north every moon. 

“I don’t pretend to have any idea of what he longs for,” she fires back, almost without meaning to. She might imagine it, but she swears Bran’s eyes sharpen in her direction for just a second. Steeling herself again, she speaks before he has a chance. 

“I don’t want to fight to keep him here, but you should know that I will, if it comes to that.”

Her brother’s eyebrows knit together at the promise – which, she realizes, wouldn’t take much to read as a threat – and then the corners of his mouth quirk up slightly, like she’s made a joke. She meets his eyes, not sure what to expect. A challenge? A reprimand? The milky white pupils that mean he’s seeing something else altogether?

But instead they just seem clear, in the strangest way. After a breath, Sansa realizes it’s the closest she’s seen to the little brother she remembers, the bold and brave Brandon Stark who dreamed of glory and titles and castles big enough for climbing. 

“Sansa,” he says, “you have marched an army towards your nightmares and stood as the lone defender of our home. You married a monster in the godswood, exposed our family’s most dangerous traitor, and faced Winterfell’s risen dead in the crypts – and you laid them all to rest. There isn’t a soul alive, sister, who would question the fierceness of the red wolf.”

Sansa presses her lips together at the moniker, but a cowardly part of her worries her brother is not yet finished.

“But?” she asks. Bran just looks at her placidly. “Father always said–”

But her brother just shakes his head. There will be no more. “The pack survives.”

Could it possibly be that easy? She almost believes it, coming from the mouth of a man who can see through time.

“Thank you, Bran.” She reaches out to clasp his hand, and when he squeezes back, she loses her carefully held control over the tears in the corners of her eyes.

“It’s been a long and terrible journey, Sansa. But you’ve made it back home.”

When she first left Winterfell – a naive girl of just three and ten who still believed in fairy tales – she had four brothers. Today, there is just Bran. And even he will leave her again soon. “Alone,” she adds absently.

_Four spaces left._

“Not alone,” her brother counters. “Not forever.”

As usual, she’s left scrambling to piece together his meaning, but before she can ask anything more, he’s waving to the door.

“I’m going to retire for the evening,” he says as Podrick wheels him away. “If you have another moment, I believe Brienne would like a word.”

Sansa just nods. “Of course. Goodnight, Bran.”

 

* * *

 

Brienne bows as she enters, but Sansa is already on her feet, ready to wrap her old friend and protector in a warm embrace. How little it’s taken to warm her spirits over this last week. Or rather, how much.

“Your Grace.”

“Please,” she dismisses with a wave of her hand, “just Sansa is fine in private.”

“Of course,” the knight demurs, though she looks almost nervous. “It’s good to see you.”

Sansa motions to one of the empty chairs, but Brienne makes no move to sit. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, very well, thank you.” Brienne looks towards the door, and then shakes her head, as if to clear her thoughts. “I just, uh… There’s someone I’d very much like for you to meet.”

Sansa freezes for a moment, but when a maid enters, carrying a bundle wrapped in blankets, her heart swoops in an entirely different direction.

Brienne takes the baby with a familiarity that tells Sansa almost everything she needs to know, and moving closer to get a better look at the child answers the remaining questions, though it does little to ease the surprise.

There’s a shock of white-blond hair, so similar to his mother’s, but when he opens his eyes, Sansa sees a green that, for just a moment, makes her blood run cold – until she glances up to see Brienne gazing at the babe with a kind of maternal tenderness that the Lannister family hasn’t known for generations now.

“Queen Sansa, it is my honor to present Lord Selmy of House Tarth.”

“Selmy,” Sansa echoes, unable to think of anything else to say at the moment. “For Ser Barristan?”

“A worthy namesake,” Brienne answers, “and a believable one, as well. But privately, I must confess, the name is a blending of my father’s and his own. Selwyn and…Jaime.”

The confession hangs in the air, though it’s less of a revelation than little Selmy himself, who lets out a pleased coo, as if he knows he’s being talked about.

Sansa can’t help but smile. “A fitting name for a handsome young lord.”

Brienne beams. “Would you like to hold him?”

She nods and settles back into her chair to receive the babe, who grins up at her instantly as she takes him in her arms. 

“How…?” she begins, before stopping herself. “Forgive me, it’s none of my–”

“The night before we went to war,” Brienne answers. Sansa doesn’t need to ask which one. She remembers that night, remembers the way it felt like time stood still at Winterfell for just a few hours. She remembers the calm before the storm, and Theon’s smile in the firelight.

“I–” She pauses again, still gazing at the little lord in wonder, even as her heart aches a little. “If you don’t mind my asking, how do you find motherhood?”

A look of confusion passed over Brienne’s face, before it settles on a wary grin, and Sansa wonders if the question has been asked of her yet. Bran’s council is made up of many wise men, but they are just that, and she doubts if Brienne has much in the way of female companionship.

“I think it is the most frightened I have ever been,” she admits. “I am uncertain of what I’m doing, almost every moment of every day.”

“I’m sure that’s not uncommon,” Sansa assures. “But Brienne, you have pledged so much of your life to protecting those who could not protect themselves. Isn’t that the root of parenthood, after all?”

When the knight looks back at her, she notices the glint of tears in her eyes. “Well said, Your Grace.  _Sansa_. And not untrue. I hope to serve my son as well as any other pledge. Better, even, if I allow myself to be selfish.”

“I only hope he hasn’t caused you too much trouble,” Sansa notes, frowning briefly. The nobility of Kings Landing had been deeply shaken by the Dragon Queen’s vengeance, of course, but she knows all too well that they can always find the time to cast aspersions.

“Only while fitting my armor in the last few months,” Brienne says with a smile, though they both know that’s not what she meant. “Your brother did me the honor of legitimizing him the day after he was born.”

The gesture doesn’t come as a surprise, but tugs at Sansa’s heart all the same.

“Bran’s a good man. A good king,” she notes, though admittedly, it’s still strange to think of her little brother in either of those terms.

“I can’t help but see it as a personal indulgence, and undeserved at that, but the king rationalized that he was already with me when I took my vow,” Brienne recalls. “Ser Podrick is fond of joking that makes Selmy a Kingsguard as well.”

“Well, and technically you haven’t fathered any children,” Sansa observes, making an indulgent face as Selmy reaches out to grasp her finger in his tiny hand.

“King Bran said the same.” the knight admits with a chuckle. “Westeros is lucky indeed to have two wise rulers.”

“And what does Tyrion think of him?”

“I imagine he will have more interest once he’s old enough for mischief and drinking,” Brienne jokes, though Sansa knows that young Selmy will undoubtedly be raised with his mother’s honor. “Neither of us seems terribly unhappy to allow Tyrion to remain as the last of his Lannister line, and one day, when he’s old enough to understand, we’ll tell my son of his father.”

A blessing, Sansa thinks, even as she sees how it’s something Brienne is still coming to terms with. Young Selmy deserves a happier chapter in the new history books. 

They all do, don’t they? She thinks of Jon’s return, of Arya’s unconventional nuptials, of the young lord nestled in her arms and his mother, who rescued her from her darkest days and kept her safe until they could find a world where these lives might be possible.

“It seems we’re all finding ways to bend the old rules, aren’t we?”

Brienne nods, with a faint smile, before narrowing to a slightly more serious look. “There’s more than one way to break a wheel, Sansa.”

“Yes, I suppose there is,” Sansa answers, a bit in awe, until Selmy interrupts the moment with an insistent gurgle.

She’s thought of this, she admits to herself. Of a babe in her arms. As a queen, and as a woman, there’s more than one reason to have imagined it.

Mercifully, no one has dared broach the subject with her yet, save for Arya, and even her warrior sister had been as gentle as Sansa can remember when she had asked. It was perhaps more worrisome than if she’d been brusque.

_“Are you sure you could?” she had asked one night, after too much wine. “Are you sure you want to?”_

_“It’s what’s expected.” It wasn’t an answer, and they both knew it._

_“If we had– Bran could legitimize one of ours…”_

_“I won’t do that to Gendry,” Sansa had already thought of that, too. “He only just got his family name, and if he’s to be a father, he’ll want to be a proper one.”_

_Arya’s eyes had gone soft and grateful, yet still she looked ready to argue. Ever prepared, Sansa had a less-sentimental point at the ready._

_“And besides, I don’t think the northern lords will look kindly on the appearance that the King in the South had a hand in choosing our successor.”_

_“Probably true.”_

_“It must be mine,” she said, resolute and unsurprised. “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.”_

_“Sansa—”_

_“I must,” she repeated, and it was enough for Arya to drop it. “So I will.”_

“I should get him back to his maid,” Brienne says, breaking her from her reverie as she stands to attention. “I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”

“Nonsense.” Sansa finds she’s almost reluctant to have the babe taken from her arms. “I hope to visit with you both as much as possible during your stay.”

The knight nods happily. “It’s very good to see you, Sansa,” she adds, “and to see you so well.”

“I owe my life to you, Ser Brienne.” Sansa stands as well, brushing out her skirts as she struggles to keep a rein on her sudden sentimentality. “My family, and my kingdom, owe you a great debt. And my pledge to you will stand in the North as a promise to House Tarth for generations to come.”

“We shall remain as grateful as we are loyal,” Brienne says with another small bow, minding the child on her shoulder as she turns for the door.

But something makes Sansa call out again.

“Brienne–” The knight turns back, and her son lets out a tiny sound of protest.

“Forgive me,” Sansa’s had the question just behind her teeth since seeing the reminder in young Selmy’s eyes, but still she stumbles, “but do you find it difficult… When you look at him, do you remember–”

As she asks the question, or struggles to, Sansa’s mind conjures an image, unbidden – a boy with a mop of auburn curls and Tully blue eyes and a girl with dark braids, her grey eyes flecked with violet.

Brienne cannot see the picture, but nods solemnly, understanding all the same.

When it comes, her answer sharpens the focus on something in the back of Sansa’s mind. “It’s not as if I’d forget, otherwise.”

Sansa nods at that, true enough. “And what a beautiful reminder.”

Brienne smiles again like the sun, and it leaves Sansa with a variety of hope that feels almost entirely new. Both of them possess hearts that deserved better than they got. But in this remade world, perhaps things are possible that never were before.

 _Not alone,_  Bran’s words return to her.  _Not forever._

There is so much joy in her heart, it’s almost impossible to understand why it is that she cries herself to sleep that night. Almost.

 

* * *

 

It snows lightly for the next few days, and then, at dusk, it is time.

Sansa busies herself as best she can in the hours leading up to the ceremony, aiding in last-minute preparations and tending to Arya – who, unsurprisingly, needs far less help than she’s prepared to offer.

So she spends the extra time pacing her own chambers and aimlessly readying her appearance – brushing her hair and re-polishing her crown and feeling like a cowardly child as she repeats to herself that this is to be a happy day. 

Mercifully, only Jon calls on her and still, when he knocks, she nearly jumps out of her skin before remembering that it won’t be Theon, come to collect her.

“Come in.” She wonders if he can hear it in her voice, or if it’s written across her face. Or if he just knows, the way he knows to remind her of her always-forgotten gloves before they walk the battlements or knows to pass her an extra glass of mead when the cooks have over-salted the stew at supper.

“All right?” Jon asks the question carefully, and Sansa realizes that, despite her best efforts, she’s grown spoiled by his presence once again. He’s found his way back into her bones, or worse, revealed himself to have always been there, and she resents the implication that she’s weaker than she thought herself to be.

“I’ll be fine, Jon.” The ire worms into her words, and she snaps at him undeservedly. “I told you, I can hold myself together.”

“I don’t doubt that, Sansa,” he replies softly, ignoring the harsh tone. “You’re the strongest person I know. I only asked if you’ll be alright.”

She sighs, and lets the shame color her cheeks before the chilly night air can do the same. “Yes.” She is a fool, but it seems there’s nothing to be done about it. And there are more important matters at hand. “Thank you.” 

He smiles, and she tries not to notice the way it crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He looks handsome, in Stark colors, with his hair freshly washed and curling around his face. She notices that, too. “I would escort you down myself, but–” 

He can’t, and they both know it. She and Bran must be in position at the heart tree before the ceremony begins, and Jon will follow to present Arya, per the bride-to-be’s most ardent wishes.

“It’s fine,” Sansa assures him. “I’ll walk out with Pod and Brienne and Selmy.”

Jon grins again at the mention of the little lord, who has become a fast favorite with all of Winterfell, and the way it makes her stomach flip is enough to distract Sansa for a few good moments.

 _A happy day,_  she repeats to herself once more, willing it so.

The walk to the godswood feels like it takes ages, her feet treading heavy through the freshly fallen snow, but finally, Sansa takes her place beside her brother, setting her shoulders proudly at the crowns that top both of their heads. When her lungs start to feel like lead, and the lantern lights begin swimming in her periphery, she does her best to conjure the same icy visage she wore when she found herself alone at her own coronation.

It works well enough, until Bran – the only person Arya had agreed to let perform the ceremony – asks the question: “Who gives her?”

Sansa’s vision blurs, and she reaches her right hand out instinctively, mercifully finding Ghost at her side.

“Jon Snow, nephew of Ned Stark.” The conversation over Jon’s titles had been a short one. While there were no arguments about letting his Targaryen name go unmentioned, he had surprisingly balked at the notion of calling himself Arya’s brother.

 _“I won’t lie in front of the old gods,”_  he had said, not knowing how his words would send a burn of shame and something else entirely through Sansa’s veins.

It’s not jealousy she feels now, she’s sure of that. It’s more like agony. It’s the memory of hearing Ramsey declare himself the heir of her family home. The memory of having no one to stand beside her except for Theon, whom she couldn’t even look at without seeing Grey Wind’s head stitched to Robb’s lifeless body. 

It’s the memory of the stupid, small hope she had that night, the flickering warmth of coming home, snuffed out so quickly by a bloodthirsty beast – and the realization that Winterfell without Starks was no home at all.

She fists her hand in Ghost’s fur, perhaps too tight, but the wolf simply shuffles his paws in the snow beside her. He leans against her leg, giving her some of his weight to balance herself against, and she presses her eyes shut with gratitude. He is Jon in every way he can be, keeping her on her feet, loyal and true.

She doesn’t hear the beginning of the vows, doesn’t see her sister’s lovestruck face when her groom smiles down at her, doesn’t realize that Jon himself has come to stand beside her until she feels his hand cover her own on his wolf’s back, fingers tangling in the spaces where tufts of white fur poke through her grip.

After a moment, she releases Ghost and turns her hand upward, letting Jon take it properly, threading their gloved fingers together. It’s snowing harder, but it’s the warmest she’s felt all day. It may not be proper, with the Northern elite looking on, but she can’t find it within herself to care. 

Things come back into focus as Gendry wraps his cloak around Arya, and Sansa allows a small, private smile at the gesture. It’s another compromise between the pair – the luxurious fur appears black to an unknowing eye, but Arya had insisted that it actually be dark grey, a shade between both of their houses. And the clasp, handmade by the groom himself, is a Stark wolf’s head that fits neatly into the decorative antlers of the Baratheon stag. 

 _There’s more than one way to break a wheel,_ Sansa thinks, tightening her fingers around Jon’s almost unconsciously. He squeezes back as the happy couple kisses, and her heart thuds in her chest, so hard she knows it won’t take much to break itself.

Suddenly, the ceremony is over, and the Northerners file out towards the Great Hall with joyous whoops and raucous good cheer. It’s nothing like her wedding day after all, and Sansa allows a deep, icy breath to fill her relieved lungs. 

Arya and Gendry share a few words with Bran before making their way over to Sansa and Jon. It’s hard not to mirror their blissful, beaming faces, and the rest of Sansa’s dread blows away in the frosty air.

“Congratulations,” she says with a genuine smile, not missing the way Arya’s eyes flick down to her and Jon’s still-clasped hands.

“Thank you, Sansa,” her sister answers simply, and she understands it’s for more than her well wishes.

Podrick wheels Bran out behind the newlyweds, and then it’s just the two of them and the old gods, left with a glance back from her brother the king that she can’t even begin to decipher. 

“Thank you, for that,” she says to the empty godswood, to the path he walked her sister down. Still clutching at his hand, she knows Jon will be able to follow her. “For being here, for…”

 _For holding me together,_ she finishes silently.

“It looked like you were hoping maybe the snow would sweep you away,” he says just as softly. That’s exactly what it was – the rightness floods her vision as she ducks her head in a nod.

“I’ve grown familiar with the feeling,” Jon admits and only when Sansa allows herself to picture him back beyond the Wall, alone again, do her traitorous tears begin to fall. 

“Sansa…”

“It’s just been so lovely having everyone here,” she sobs, feeling childish in her misery, especially on such a happy day. “And soon you’re all going to leave again.”

_Winterfell without Starks is no home at all._

Jon tugs at their entwined fingers, spinning her to face him, and lifts his free hand to brush away the tear tracks on her cheeks.

“I’ll stay.” 

They’re the words she’s been longing to hear, but Sansa doesn’t trust them. Not now, not after everything that’s happened today. It’s sentimentality that’s shaping his offer, she worries, not true emotion.

“Don’t do that,” she says, with a shake of her head that makes his hands drop away. “Don’t do it just for me.”

“Why not?” he asks. “You’re my queen. You’re my family. What better reason could I ask for?”

“You know there’s a better one,” she says bitterly. “I won’t order you. I just wish you… I wish you wanted to.”

“You think I don't…?” His brow furrows in disbelief. “Gods, Sansa, that’s not any of it.”

She waits, because to guess would mean exposing the last piece of herself that’s left to break. She can’t risk it, not even for Jon. She needs to hear him say it. 

“You know I’d give you anything you wanted,” he tells her, low and sincere. “But the way I feel, here with you, with our family, it’s bliss and it’s agony at the same time. Because I know I don’t deserve it.” 

“The world is a cruel place, Jon,” Sansa answers, crossing her arms as protection against the cold and her own insecurities. “So few actually get what they deserve. And I’ve seen too many smiles on the faces of evil men. I’m not sure I actually believe that the gods care if we suffer or revel in the time we’ve been given.”

He looks at her, for a long moment, and then he nods.

“Aye, maybe you’re right.” They’re so close. If he can let himself take one more step, perhaps they can move forward together. But still, Sansa is afraid to hope.

“I think Arya’s right about taking what we want,” she offers, channeling her brave little sister, who found the love she wanted, and fought to keep it. “We survived. We’re alive, for however long the seven allow.”

“You’re right about that, too.” Nobody knows that better than him. 

Jon raises his hands to her face again, but this time he’s removed his gloves. She nearly swoons at the warmth of his palms against her cheeks, the way the pads of his fingers trace at her earlobes and her neck. Their eyes meet, and it’s almost enough to make her believe. 

“So, what do you want, Jon?”  _Tell me,_ her heart whispers.  _Please just say it._

“I want you to be happy.” He presses his forehead to hers as the snow falls harder around them, and when her traitorous eyelids slip shut for just a blissful second, she feels him lean up to drop a kiss on each one, then her nose and cheeks in succession. “You deserve it, Sansa, all the joy the world has to offer.”

“You can give it to me, Jon,” she pleads, opening her eyes once more to show him everything she has left to offer, everything she has to lose. “Please. We can have it together.”

The moment that follows feels agonizingly slow, but finally, he nods, eyes brimming with the emotion she’d been too afraid to hope for. Sansa gasps when she sees it, and he catches the sound as he presses his lips to her own. 

She’s never known a kiss like this one. It’s ice and fire together where they touch, bliss and heat and home and…

 _Joy._  Days ago, she hadn’t even been able to remember what the feeling was called, but it finds her now, wrapped in his arms. It finds them as he whispers that he loves her, before taking her lips once again.

It finds them in Great Hall, as they join the feast to celebrate her sister and her new brother-in-law. It finds them in front of the heart tree again, not many moons later. It finds them in her chambers and then in her birthing bed; it finds them as the rooms of the Great Keep are filled once again with the sounds of family. 

It finds them in the glass gardens, when Queen Sansa is dragged away by her husband for a much-needed respite from the day’s duties, and in the library, as a new generation of maesters do their best to school a new generation of unruly Starks, and in the sparring yard, as Jon proudly leads young swordsmen (and women) in their first practice parries.

It finds them in smiles and sighs, in snow and storms and spring and summer. Joy finds Winterfell once again, and mercifully, it stays.

* * *

[ _A/N: Come say hey on Tumblr!_ ](https://theshipsfirstmate.tumblr.com/post/612545729318240256/game-of-thrones-fic-please-speak-well-of-me-part)


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